Abstract
The Project Talent Study(PT) was the largest, nationally-representative study of high school students conducted in the US. In 1960, PT collected data on students’ academic aptitudes, interests, personality, family background, personal characteristics, and experiences. With participants now in their 70s, PT is a valuable resource for studying adolescent life determinants of health and aging. AIR linked 143,698 PT participant records to their 2012–2013 Medicare Claims and Expenditures data. In this paper, we provide an overview of the PT-Medicare linked data (PT-MED). We describe the PT study design and measures, the linked Medicare Claims data, and the linkage methodology. We also evaluate the generalizability of analysis results using PT-MED and discuss the research applications of this linked dataset. PT-MED provides a prime dataset for studying the impact of adolescent life factors on health and health spending in older adults.